Overview

Living in the Past by Philip Schultz

Set in Rochester, New York, in the fifties, this extraordinary book-length sequence traces the year in a boy's life leading up to his bar mitzvah and passage into manhood. There is a lively mixture of ethnic groups here-many of them displaced by the war in Europe-with new hopes and dreams. It is a uniquely American place, where "no matter how far down you started from, you began again from the beginning."

As the alternately elegiac and humorous poems conclude, the boy has become a man with a family of his own, but memories of his childhood linger. The cycles of life go on, and Schultz continues to render them with wit, grace, and above all a sense of wonder.

I know what Mrs. Einhorn said Mrs. Edels told Mr. Kook about us: God save us from having one shirt, one eye, one child. I know in order to survive. Grandma throws her shawl of exuberant birds over her bony shoulders and ladles up yet another chicken thigh out of the steaming broth of the infinite night sky. -from "Grandma climbs"

Product Details

About the Author

Born and raised in Rochester, NewYork, PHILIP SCHULTZ is the author of several collections of poetry. He has received awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Academy of American Poets. He lives in East Hampton, New York.

PHILIP SCHULTZ won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for his book of poems, Failure. His poetry and fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, the Nation, the New Republic, and the Paris Review, among other magazines. In addition, he is the founder and director of the Writers Studio in New York.

Editorial Reviews

A worried boy gets ready for his bar mitzvah, a grown man looks back on his extended family, and a somber poet reflects on the Holocaust in this moving, if hardly groundbreaking, sequence of 81 untitled poems. The first 54 remain narrative in their focus, setting the scene in "Rochester, NY, in the fifties, when all the Displaced Persons/ move in and suddenly even the elms look defeated." Schultz (The Holy Worm of Praise) introduces an immigrant milieu where "Everyone dickers with God." A pyromaniac uncle, a suspicious grandmother, the sexy "new girl at the end of the ally" and an overconfident rabbi provide the supporting cast. Central figures are the boy himself (never named); the boy's father; and Mr. Schwartzman, a Holocaust survivor whose suicide gives Schultz a sad counterpoint to the boy's own coming of age. The last 27 poems reflect on the story from the vantage point of an adulthood where "One needs to be practical"; citing Jewish philosophers (Martin Buber among them) Schultz views the past as "houses full of performing souls, each a single/ beautiful spark." Schultz's long, clear free verse lines maintain a trustworthy voice; set beside earlier poetic takes, however, on American Jews' postwar inheritance (Robert Pinsky, say, or Adrienne Rich), Schultz's offerings seem neither formally, nor thematically, new. (Apr.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

PRAISE FOR THE HOLY WORM OF PRAISE

"This is easily one of the strongest collections of lyrics published in the last decade."Library Journal

"Moving fluidly from desire to pain to loss, sympathy, understanding and love, the poems in The Holy Worm of Praise are haunting meditations on friendship and the world's forgotten."American Poet